The New Masters of the Universe. By Joel Kotkin.

The New Masters of the Universe. By Joel Kotkin. Spiked, December 2015. Also at JoelKotkin.com.

Kotkin:

From Silicon Valley, a new elite is coming.

Every age produces its own brand of oligarchs – feudal lords, banking gnomes, captains of industry. Our age has its own incipient ruling class, the tech oligarchs.

The ascendency of these new hegemons is barely complete, and could conceivably be slowed or even reversed. But the tidal wave of new wealth, and even greater influence, will not be easily turned back. Six of the world’s 20 richest people are from tech or related industries like media and entertainment. In America, the media-tech sector in 2014 accounted for five of the top wealthiest people. Not surprisingly, most self-made billionaires are either quite old (the Koch Brothers, the Waltons, Warren Buffett) or got rich the traditional way: they inherited it. In contrast, virtually all self-made billionaires under 40 are techies.

The making of a new ruling class

With their massive, and early, accumulated wealth, the tech oligarchs will dominate us long after the inheritors have financed the last art museum or endowed the newest hospital. Two decades from now, many tech oligarchs will still be young enough to be counting their billions and thinking up new ways to “disrupt” our lives – for our own good, of course.

This tech elite differs from the founding generation of Silicon Valley. The early leaders – Bob Packard, Bob Noyce, Andrew Grove, Jerry Sanders – tended to be centrist and pragmatic. After all, the early Valley was heavily subsidised by the military and NASA, and produced industrial products that faced enormous competition. They also managed vast organisations with large numbers of ordinary employees. Like other industrialists, they were concerned with low-cost power and water, reasonable labour regulation and the health of the overall manufacturing economy.

This changed when a combination of keen Asian competition and Californian regulation gradually shifted the chip and computer manufacturers out of Silicon Valley, which has lost roughly 80,000 manufacturing jobs since 2000. The new Valley is predominately post-industrial. For example, only 30 of about 16,000 production workers for the iPod are based in the US.

As Silicon Valley became software valley, tech firms no longer needed large numbers of semi-skilled workers and the network of small subcontractors to keep the industrial machine going. Those services, if needed, could be performed in India, China, Utah, Texas or North Carolina. “The job creation has changed,” notes long-time San Jose economic development official Leslie Parks. “We used to be the whole food chain and create all sorts of middle-class jobs. Now, increasingly, we don’t design the future – we just think about it. That makes some people rich, but not many.”

What has made “the sovereigns of cyberspace,” to quote author Rebecca MacKinnon, so wealthy is precisely what made John D Rockefeller so rich: control of markets. Google, for example, accounts for over 60 per cent of search, while, alongside Apple, it control almost 90 per cent of the operating systems for smartphones. Similarly, over half of American and Canadian computer users use Facebook, making it easily the world’s dominant social-media site.

More important still, the tech oligarchs control portions of their companies that would make most oilmen or auto executives fantastically rich. Indeed, owners of only one energy-related firm, Koch Industries, have made it into the top 10 of the Forbes 400. The CEO and chairman of Exxon-Mobil, America’s largest oil company, Rex Tillerson, controls 0.04 per cent of Exxon stock, while Google’s Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt control roughly two thirds of the company’s voting stock. Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg also control outsized shares of their firms.

These firms are now so rich that they resemble countries. Besides General Electric, a classic conglomerate, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle and Google often have more dollars on hand than the US government. And their influence can be felt in every office, home and phone through intrusive software that provides a trove of personal data that would make the old KGB turn from red to green with envy. As Google’s Eric Schmidt put it: “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”

The politics of the intangible class

The liberation from the constraints of the tangible economy has inflamed the ambitions of the oligarchs. “Politics for me is the most obvious area [to be disrupted by the web],” suggests former Facebook president Sean Parker. The success with which social media assisted President Obama’s re-election effort offers clear support to Parker’s assertion.

In allying with Obama, tech is moving in the opposite direction to much of the business community, particularly small business, which Gallup finds a hotbed of anti-Obama sentiment. Other traditional industries like oil and gas have also turned overwhelmingly to the right, as Obama has targeted them for their role in climate change. In 1990, energy firms gave out almost as much to Democrats as Republicans; in 2014 they gave over three times as much to the GOP.

In contrast, the oligarchs, as they have become ever richer, are clearly moving leftwards. In 2000, the communications and electronics sector was basically even in its donations; by 2012, it was better than two to one Democratic. Microsoft, Apple and Google – not to mention entertainment companies – all overwhelmingly lean to the Democrats with their donations.

The transformer and the disrupters

There seems a natural affinity between President Obama, who sees himself as a force for transformation, and the tech oligarchs, who love “disruption.” Each shares a high estimate of their basic intelligence and foresight; it is an alliance of those who feel they should own and shape the future.

“We need to run the experiment, to show what a society run by Silicon Valley looks like,” venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya recently argued. This effort could appeal to a public that tends to regard the tech firms as better than more mundane businesses or the government. Indeed, when Steve Jobs, a 0.000001 per center worth $7 billion, and rugged capitalist of the classic type, passed away, protesters openly mourned his demise.

One critical PR advantage the tech firms enjoy is that most, with a notable exception of Amazon, don’t mistreat blue-collar workers, or unions, since they have few of either. This gets them a free pass from social-justice warriors unavailable to traditional firms. Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford mostly exploited workers in Pittsburgh or Detroit, and paid a price; the exploitation of the oligarchs takes place far away in Chengdu, Guangzhou or India.

This alliance with the Democrats will not fade after Obama leaves office. Obama has enlisted several tech giants – including venture capitalist John Doerr, LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla – to help plan out his no doubt lavish and highly political retirement. Many former Obama aides have gone to work for tech firms. Uber, for example, uses Obama campaign manager David Plouffe to lead its PR team, while other former officials have descended to other tech firms such as AirBnB, Google, Twitter and Amazon.

What is the ideology of Silicon Valley?

Silicon Valley may be progressive in its social or environmental positions, but it has little interest in class politics, an issue being pushed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. “They don’t like [Bernie] Sanders at all,” notes San Francisco-based researcher Greg Ferenstein, who has been polling internet company founders for an upcoming book. Sanders’ emphasis on income redistribution, protecing union privileges and pensions hardly reflects the views of the tech elite. “He’s an egalitarian liberal,” Ferenstein explains, “these people are tech liberals. Equality is a non-issue in Silicon Valley.”

What are “tech liberals”? Ferenstein provides a picture of an unconscious elitism that runs through their worldview. Although their industry is overwhelmingly based in the San Francisco Peninsula’s suburban sprawl, the internet oligarchs, he claims, want “everyone” to move to the urban centre, something not remotely practical for most middle- and working-class families. They also advocate for strict environmental laws and ever higher energy prices, which don’t threaten their lifestyles, but are often devastating to those below them.

Yet there is a danger that the issue of inequality could eventually affect the tech industry’s PR. Unlike the earlier products, such as computers or semiconductors, the products the tech industry now develop have provided little of value to the rest of society, whether in terms of jobs (outside of the Bay Area) or boosting productivity. The social-media industry has made the likes of Mark Zuckerberg fantastically wealthy, but it’s difficult to maintain it has improved living conditions for most Americans.

At the same time, well-financed Valley “disruption” can be seen as a threat to many businesses and individuals. These already include groups such as cab drivers, owners and workers at small hotels, realtors and travel agents, and newspaper scribblers, all of whom are being driven out of the middle class. The much-needed “sharing economy” often offers these workers part-time employment without much in the way of benefits.

Even in the tech industry itself, American workers find themselves increasingly replaced by imported foreign workers. Oligarchs such as Mark Zuckerberg are anxious to expand H1B and other “guest-worker programmes” that bring in low-cost indentured tech workers to the Valley, as well as to IT departments across corporate America.

Of course, this hardly makes the tech oligarchs unique – after all, capitalists have always sought out the cheapest source of labour, and understandably so. But it does mean that, in oligarchic America, where even getting a degree in computer science and software does not guarantee a bright future, the hip, PR-friendly “don’t be evil” appearance of tech companies may soon be looking a little less cool.

Techies on the green team

Perhaps nothing separates the oligarchy from the rest of business than its support for Obama’s climate-change policies. Many industries see these policies as a direct threat to their very existence, but this means little to moguls, who can shift their energy needs to cheaper locales, such as the Pacific Northwest or the South. In California, such policies have less an impact on the temperate coast than in the less glamorous interior. As one recent study found, the summer electrical bills in rich, liberal and temperate Marin come to $250 monthly, while in impoverished, hotter Madera, the average is twice as high.

Not that there’s anything cynical about the tech oligarchy’s commitment to green policies. It is entirely sincere – the oligarchs really do believe, as do many liberal, Democratic types, that they are fighting the good fight. But that doesn’t mitigate the effects of their worldview.

Still, the oligarch’s energy politics are not entirely based on the greater good. For Silicon Valley and Wall Street supporters, there are also some business opportunities in the assault on fossil fuels. Cash-rich firms like Google and Apple, and many high-tech financiers and venture capitalists, have invested in subsidised green energy firms. Some, like Elon Musk, exist largely as creatures of subsidies. Neither Solar City nor Tesla would be so attractive, or might not even exist, without generous handouts.

The brave new world of the oligarchs

If we want to get some idea how an oligarch-dominated economy works, take a look at my adopted home state – of over 40 years – of California, the home of the most powerful oligarchs. The Golden State sees itself as the “brains” of the tech culture and proof of the bountiful ingenuity of “the creative class.”

Yet behind the media glitz, California is increasingly a bifurcated state, divided between a glamorous software- and media-based economy concentrated in certain coastal areas, and a declining, and increasingly impoverished, interior. Overall, nearly a quarter of Californians live in poverty, the highest percentage of any state, including Mississippi, and, according to a recent United Way study, close to one in three people are barely able to pay their bills.

So how do the oligarchs make this work politically? One way is simply to make alliances – through contributions and media support – with politicians who are most hurt by California’s regulatory vice. This strategy is evident in the odd coupling of San Francisco hedge-fund billionaire, Tom Steyer, the biggest funder of climate-change hysteria, and his Latino sidekick, California Senator Kevin de Leon, who represents impoverished East Los Angeles.

The new political configuration works in classic medieval fashion, with the rich providing the necessities for the poor, without providing them opportunity for upward mobility or the chance, God forbid, to buy a house in the outer suburbs. With the fading of California’s once powerful industrial economy – Los Angeles has lost much of its manufacturing base over the past decade – its working classes now must be mollified by symbolic measures, such as energy rebates, subsidised housing and the ever illusive chimera of “green jobs.”

This “upstairs-downstairs” California coalition could presage the country’s political future. Perhaps it’s best to think of it as a form of high-tech feudalism, in which the upper classes run the show, but bestow goodies on the struggling masses. This alliance will allow the present tech oligarchs to thrive without facing a populist challenge that could interfere with their profits and expansion into other markets.

In the oligarchic era, the bottom line is an increasing concentration of power in ever fewer hands. Romantic notions that the high-tech era would be marked by a surge of small, independent companies are belied by the market domination of a few firms and their expansion into ever more business areas. Companies like Google begin to morph into conglomerates, or American versions of Japan’s keiretsu, with interests in such businesses as health, media and autonomous vehicles.

Similar keiretsu are forming around companies such as Apple, Amazon and Facebook, which now can buy their way into what were once seen as unrelated markets. This is married to increased media power, which will allow them to set the agenda in coming decades. This is being accomplished both through the purchase of old media – the most important being the purchase by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos of the venerable Washington Post – or by new sites controlled by firms like Yahoo, the No 1 news site in the US, with 110 million monthly viewers, or Google’s news site with 65,000,000 users.

The intrusion of tech firms into media is likely to become even more pervasive as the millennial generation grows up and the older cohorts begin to die off. Among those over 50, only 15 per cent, according to a Pew report, get their news over the internet; among those under 30, the number rises to 65 per cent.

Ultimately the ambitions of the oligarchs are boundless. Firms like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, and Elon Musk’s Space X, seek to lead the world in space exploration. If NASA continues to retreat from many areas of space exploration, it is likely that, in the future, the heavens may end up belonging to the oligarchs as well.

When historians write the history of this age, their attention likely will focus on the rise of these oligarchies. They already control California, with its unparalleled creative and technical prowess, as well as the dominant cultural power centre in the English-speaking world. Tomorrow the new oligarchs will be looking to consolidate their power in Washington. And the day after that, maybe the world and galaxy as well.

Elites and Media Really Hate Donald Trump’s Voters. By Michael Walsh.

Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, December 21, 2015. Getty Images.

Elites and media really hate Donald Trump’s voters. By Michael Walsh. New York Post, December 26, 2015.

Walsh:

To hear the patronizing wise men of the Republican Party tell it, anyone who would vote for Donald Trump for president must be deranged. “Trumpkins,” they call them, mental midgets and xenophobic troglodytes who’ve crawled out from their survivalist caves in order to destroy the Beltway Establishment.

How their resentful attitude galls the crack cadres of campaign consultants who brought conservatives halfhearted standard-bearers like John McCain and Mitt Romney to do sham battle against Barack Obama in 2008 and ’12, then return to the safety of the US Senate and a beachfront mansion in La Jolla.

The peasants are revolting!

And all on behalf of a bloviating billionaire whose conservatism and party loyalty are suspect.

Now, after months of whistling past the graveyard of Trump’s seemingly inexorable rise and assuring themselves that his candidacy will collapse as voters come to their senses, a CNN poll released Wednesday showing Trump now lapping the field has the GOP establishment in full meltdown mode. The survey shows Trump with nearly 40% of the primary vote, trailed by Ted Cruz at 18%, Ben Carson and Marco Rubio tied at 10%, and the also-rans (including great GOP hope Jeb Bush) limping along far behind.

Their panic was best articulated last week in The Daily Beast by GOP consultant Rick Wilson, who wrote that Trump supporters “put the entire conservative movement at risk of being hijacked and destroyed by a bellowing billionaire with poor impulse control and a profoundly superficial understanding of the world . . . walking, talking comments sections of the fever swamp sites.”

Some might take that as a backhanded compliment. Can the GOP really be so out of touch with the legions of out-of-work Americans — many of whom don’t show up in the “official” unemployment rate because they’ve given up looking for work in the Obama economy? With the returning military vets frustrated with lawyer-driven, politically correct rules of engagement that have tied their hands in a fight against a mortal enemy? With those who, in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino massacres by Muslims, reasonably fear an influx of culturally alien “refugees” and “migrants” from the Middle East?

With those who fear for their own families’ futures and the future of the country as founded?

In other words, has the junior wing of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party, ably embodied by Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, forsaken even token opposition to the “progressive” ethos? Can it be true that everybody’s fondest wish for Campaign ’16 is the dynastic-restoration battle of Clinton vs. Bush?

Jeb Bush seems to think so, suggesting recently that he might rethink the pledge he signed vowing to support the eventual Republican nominee. To which The Donald characteristically responded: Who cares? “He is a low-energy person, and he does not represent strength, power and stamina, which are qualities our country desperately needs.”

Others have suggested, half in jest, that should Trump win the nomination, the GOP might have to go third party — against its own nominee.

Even lame-duck Obama has waded in, cheekily blaming “economic stresses” and flatlining wages for Trump’s groundswell. “Particularly, blue-collar men have had a lot of trouble in this new economy, where they are no longer getting the same bargain that they got when they were going to a factory and able to support their families on a single paycheck . . . Somebody like Mr. Trump is taking advantage of that.”

Remember when Obama apologized for saying that voters who disagreed with him “cling to guns or religion”? Yeah, guess he wasn’t really sorry.

Objections to Trump include that he has no clue that politics is, as the saying goes, the art of the possible. That his reality-show candidacy — as a recent Quinnipiac poll purportedly found — would be an “embarrassment” to half the country. That the “short-fingered vulgarian” — as the old Spy magazine famously dubbed him — is neither a real Republican nor a real conservative.

To which his supporters, to whom he is an anger-directed guided missile heading straight for Washington, retort: So what? The irrepressible Trump is already ignoring his rivals and gleefully taking the fight to the presumptive (if she doesn’t get indicted) Democrat nominee, noted prevaricator Hillary Clinton.

In the movie business, there’s something called the “cheer moment,” when the long-suffering hero finally decks his tormentor with a satisfying right cross. What the Beltway Republicans fail to understand is that their conservative base — which gave them stunning congressional victories in 2010 and 2014 and has nothing to show for it — has been longing for precisely that moment since Reagan crushed Mondale 49-1 in 1984.

The Trumpkins are sick of winning and having nothing to show for it, and their vengeance will be terrible. Maybe the Establishment should stop belittling them and listen instead.

Terror Psychology: The Mindset of a Jihadi. By Gina Loudon.

Terror Psychology: Mindset of a Jihadi. By Gina Loudon. WND, November 15, 2015.

Loudon:

The attacks in Paris changed the game of terror because ISIS has proven its ability to recruit from local populations to achieve its goals. No longer can a country stay safe by careful scanning of foreign entries. Social media and mass communication have changed all of that. Today, American mothers are shocked to learn that their wayward child has joined ISIS. But who is at risk, and what is the psychology of the recruiting process?

Surprisingly, the Black Lives Matter group, and college protests of everything from 9/11 celebrations to safe spaces, lend some precious insight to the vulnerable. These seemingly hapless acts of those with underdeveloped brains on college campuses illuminate a truth that is well documented in research on terror. The psychology of such tribalistic activities parallels the tribal behavior that Islam uses to recruit, and it thrives for two simple reasons – collectivism and globalism.

No newscaster will admit this, but research proves it out.

Experts offer a number of answers, including that terrorists prey on those who feel disenfranchised, who see themselves as victims or who have the desire to take action and believe in violence.

One thing is certain: For terrorism to have impact, terrorists must find a regular supply of recruits.

Jerrold M. Post of George Washington University suggests Islam, like communism, uses collectivism to convince victims to sacrifice.

He said the recipe for terror includes a combination of the following: 

·         a strong sense of victimization,

·         fear of group extinction,

·         a feeling of a higher moral condition than the lives of the enemy, and lack of political power to make the wanted change.

“Being part of a collectivist cause has always been a hallmark of people willing to undergo personal sacrifices,” said Arie Kruglanski, co-director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START.

Kruglanski surveyed thousands of Arabs and people from other cultures, and he found that those most likely to support terrorist activities against Americans are indeed those with the strongest collectivist mentality. Kruglanski said the findings suggest that joining terrorist groups may confer a sense of security and meaning that people do not feel as individuals.

Georgetown University’s Fathali Moghaddam suggests globalism and a fear of cultural annihilation has also contributed to the terrorist mentality.

He writes that globalization has forced on many cultures a large-scale neurotic drive to survive. Moghaddam says Islamic terror is a reaction to the fear that the fundamentalist Islamic way of life is under attack.

Moghaddam’s explanation seems to excuse Islam’s use of terror and implies that they are defending themselves and only trying to survive. Perhaps Moghaddam should research the Quran’s teachings on violence and jihad.

Kruganski and others have come up with ideas on how to convince terrorists that they should not use violence.

They are exploring the use of tactics like using moderate Muslim clerics to teach imprisoned detainees about the Quran’s “true teachings” on violence and jihad.

They also suggested showing concern for the families for terror detainees such as funding their children’s education or offering professional training for their wives.

A while back I spoke to my co-author, clinical psychologist Dr. Dathan Paterno, about these ideas.

Dr. Paterno said, “The idea of paying the education costs of terrorists’ children as some sort of ‘peace’ offering is not only upsetting, it is laughable on its face. … Every bully knows he is winning when he extracts more loot from his victim. It isn’t until the victim punches back – squarely and repetitively – that he gains some respect from the bully. The same is true for Islamic terrorists. Peace is non-negotiable. We need to hit back hard each time, and make them feel it. Until they hurt more critically and more consistently than we do, they will never stop.”

Paterno pushes the point further.

“If we are to follow Kruglanski’s idea and teach the truth of Islam’s teaching on jihad and violence, we would certainly open a few eyes, because violence against ‘infidels’ is advised hundreds of times in the Quran. Those probably are faulty assumptions on the part of the professor, however well-intended.”

Aside from the mindset, there are several personality factors that contribute to terrorism.

Sarah Kershaw in the New York Times cites Ervin Staub from the University of Massachusetts, who says there are three things that lead to terrorist expansion and the way it flourishes today:

Idealists – They support the terror based upon their own ability to identify with the suffering of some group that they are not even a part of. This can be misplaced.

Respondents – They support terror based upon personal experience as a member of a group being defended by a terrorist reportedly acting on the behalf of that persecuted group.

Lost souls – They are adrift, isolated and often ostracized. They can find a sense of purpose in a radical group, so they are “ripe for the picking.”

Kershaw cites another psychologist, Clark McCauley of Bryn Mawr College, who names four basic trajectories of a terrorist:

Revolutionaries – They are involved in a cause over time.

Wanderers – They move from extremist group to extremist group, searching for a sense of purpose.

Converts – They suddenly break with their past and become a part of an extremist movement.

Compliants – They convert to the group via persuasion by a friend, a relative or a romantic interest.

According to the New York Times article by Kershaw, experts weed out the mentally unstable, meaning the truly insane (such as paranoid schizophrenia in the case of Ted Kaczynski, the “Unibomber”). Some contend that actual, clinical insanity is not a leading indicator of susceptibility to follow a terror group, nor is it a credible defense after a terrorist crime in most cases. Further, she says, terrorist leaders prefer to select those of highest status for their suicide missions, since they believe sending those with more to lose lends credibility to their mission.

Other professionals disagree with the opinion that Muslims are fundamentally insane. They argue that the Islamic acceptance of rape, the training of children to kill and the severe oppression, even mutilation and killing of women is not the product of a sane culture. They say the claims of a mental imbalance is little more than an excuse to literally get away with more murder.

Psychologist Nicolai Sennals said: “As a psychologist in a Danish youth prison, I had a unique chance to study the mentality of Muslims. Seventy percent of youth offenders in Denmark have a Muslim background. I was able to compare them with non-Muslim clients from the same age group with more or less the same social background. I came to the conclusion that Islam and Muslim culture have certain psychological mechanisms that harm people’s development and increase criminal behavior.”

He said the typical ways the U.S. deals with crime, politics and punishment is a glaring antithesis to what is really needed to stop the war Islamic terror exacted upon the West.

“Far too many people underestimate the power of psychology embedded in religion and culture,” he said. “As we have already seen, no army of social workers, generous welfare states, sweet-talking politicians, politically correct journalists or democracy-promoting soldiers can stop these enormous forces. Sensible laws on immigration and Islamization in our own countries can limit the amount of suffering, but based on my education and professional experience as a psychologist for Muslims, I estimate that we will not be able to deflect or avoid this many-sided, aggressive movement against our culture.”

But disagreement still abounds among mental health professionals around the world. Solutions evade professionals because of cultural, religious and political differences that appear to culminate in the perfect storm of confusion on the matter, even for the most highly trained psychoanalysts in the world.

More and more the trend is to point to the dangerous occupation of Islam and the West’s stubborn refusal to look squarely at the problem and call it what it is – strictly an Islamic problem. Some analysts say until that first step is accomplished, they are pessimistic that true solutions can be found to curb the violence that will likely affect generations to come.

ISIS Finally Comes After the Jews. By Shmuley Boteach.

No Holds Barred: IS finally comes after the Jews. By Shmuley Boteach. Jerusalem Post, December 28, 2015.





Boteach:

IS is a group of creatures who through their brutality have erased the image of God from their countenance and no longer resemble anything human.

The Kurds have essentially been the only group doing anything to battle Islamic State on the ground and save Yazidi men, women and children from enslavement and death.

For the past few years, the West thought they could ignore this “contained” holocaust that’s been raging in Syria and Iraq.

In recent months, Islamic State (IS) blew up a Russian passenger jet, France saw the slaughter of its citizens in the streets of Paris, and the US experienced a massacre of 14 people in sunny California. These acts add to the growing list of IS-inspired attacks and attempted attacks that have caused the Western world to open its eyes to the evil proliferating across the globe.

And now, finally a number of willing nations have stepped up the war against IS, with not the US but Russia leading the way, and the IS is suddenly finding itself on the ropes, with territory being lost and fighters losing courage.

Something I have found so surprising throughout all these events is how IS and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi have hardly made even the smallest mention of Israel or the Jews. I was waiting for that inevitable day when IS would declare its intentions to destroy Israel and commit genocide against the Jewish people.

It’s kind of a coming of age, a rite of passage for a terrorist group when the day comes that they announce their intentions to wipe out the Israelites. But the weeks and months passed and we heard not a peep.

I was not alone in noticing this. For the past few years a favorite rumor among conspiracy theorists and haters of Israel alike has been that IS is actually a Mossad organization, and Baghdadi is in reality a Jew.

Why else have they not done anything to harm the Jews? After all, no one can deny that, barring immediate existential threats, the Jews pretty much always receive the top honors on the genocide wish lists of terrorist organizations.

And now suddenly this last Saturday, after IS had finally taken a real beating from Western forces and air strikes, Baghdadi released a message to his demoralized fighters in which he declares, “We are getting closer to you [Israel] day by day. Do not think that we have forgotten about you.”

Baghdadi continues, “God caused the Jews of the world to gather in Israel, and the war against them has become easy. It is the obligation of every Muslim to carry out Jihad.” He added, “Jews, you will not enjoy Palestine. God has gathered you in Palestine so that the Mujahedeen can reach you soon and you will hide by the rock and the tree.

Palestine will be your graveyard.”

Baghdadi’s threats could have been a little more original, seeing as how Hezbollah’s head Hassan Nasrallah has also previously claimed that the Jews were gathered to Israel to make it easier to kill them all, and Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have referenced the same Hadith about the rocks and trees calling for Muslims to kill the Jews at the end of days.

Nonetheless, Baghdadi finally made the “kill the Jews” proclamation, and the timing is somewhat understandable. History has shown us that whenever the going gets tough for nations, blaming the Jews and promising to wipe them out has been an extremely effective technique for distracting the general population from its woes while uniting them behind a common cause. In 167 BCE, the Hellenized Syrians led by Antiochus Epiphanes realized their bloody campaign to conquer Egypt had failed. The Jews in Israel under Antiochus’ dominion were a perfect scapegoat to vent their frustrations on, and the persecutions began.

This put in motion the events that led to the rise of the Maccabees who soundly defeated the Syrians and declared independence for Judea.

Similarly the Nazis made good use of this technique in the wake of WWI. Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany’s defeat and claimed an international Jewish conspiracy was responsible for the suffering of the German people. This set the foundation for the rise of the Nazis, WWII and the Holocaust.

This scapegoating of the Jewish people by struggling leaders and nations has repeated itself over and over again in history. So now that Baghdadi has referenced the Jews, it’s likely that things must be getting tough for IS. Once you play the Jew card, you’re desperate for a scapegoat. And it seems to work every time. In fact, a recent article written by German reporter Jurgen Todenhofer who visited IS for 10 days claims that IS fears the Israeli army more than any other.

“They told me they know the Israeli army is too strong for them,” Todenhofer said.

“They think they can defeat US and UK ground troops, who they say they have no experience in city guerrilla or terrorist strategies.

But they know the Israelis are very tough as far as fighting against guerrillas and terrorists.”

Regardless of IS’s fear of starting a war with Israel, hatred of the Jews has been Baghdadi’s ace in the hole all along. He knows it is the one thing that all Islamic terrorist organizations the world over can agree upon and rally behind (not to mention all neo-Nazi and racial supremacist groups as well). The blood of an infidel may be nice, but the blood of a Jew, now that really gets terrorists excited. The IS leader must be getting desperate if he’s finally resorting to this time-honored technique.

TOO BAD for Baghdadi that he’s failed to learn from history. Sure, the outspoken hatred of the Jews can often times get someone into a position of power – as the Talmud itself teaches: “Whoever harasses the Jews will find followers who make him a leader.” But Baghdadi, and all the other haters of Israel, have failed to realize that every single one of those nations who persecuted and attempted genocide against the Jews, in the end faced calamity and destruction and are lost to the dustbin of history. And the Jews throughout it all have always managed to survive with each adversary they overcome, albeit with sacrifices far too numerous to justify the victorious outcome.

It has often been said that IS is a group of people who want to take the world back to the dark ages. I disagree. IS is a group of creatures who through their brutality have erased the image of God from their countenance and no longer resemble anything human. And the West needs to understand that an international ground troops coalition against them is a non-negotiable necessity before this disgusting cancer metastasizes and more innocent people die in the most gruesome way.

The End of the Arab Spring Dream. By Sohrab Ahmari.

The End of the Arab Spring Dream. By Sohrab Ahmari. Wall Street Journal, December 16, 2015.

Lowering the bar for Arab Israelis. By Ilan Manor. Jerusalem Post, December 28, 2015.

Opinion Jounal: Still Dreaming of the Arab Spring. Sohrab Ahmari interviewed by Mary Kissel. Video. Wall Street Journal, December 17, 2015.

Death of the Arab Spring Revisited with Sohrab Ahmari. Interviewed by Philippe Assouline. The Lip TV, December 29, 2015. YouTube.









Ahmari:

Disorganized urban liberalism couldn’t compete with the politics of tribe—or Islamism.

Thursday marks a bitter anniversary in the Arab world. On Dec. 17, 2010, a Tunisian fruit vendor named  Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after the authorities confiscated his goods and beat him. The incident sparked an uprising that within weeks would topple Tunisia’s venal autocracy. Protests spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria. Despots from Morocco to Mesopotamia felt the heat of popular anger. Many couldn’t withstand it.

Yet today the Middle East is less stable, and less hopeful, than it was before the Arab Spring. Five years ago, the denim-clad, smartphone-wielding Arab liberal became the region’s avatar. Now the knife-wielding jihadist and the refugee have risen to prominence instead.

Each Arab Spring country is unhappy in its own way. Tunisia is the only success story among the bunch, having adopted a secular constitution and completed several peaceful power transfers. As Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia’s moderate Islamic Ennahda party, recently told me, “We’ve remained on the bridge of democratic transition while others have fallen off.” True, but the birthplace of the Arab Spring is also the world’s top exporter of fighters for Islamic State, or ISIS.

The situation in Egypt is similarly mixed. The country is once more ruled by the officer corps and back to its prerevolutionary funk: repressive and paranoid, yes, but also stable and on the path of economic reform.

Things are far worse in Yemen and Libya, which have ceased to exist as unified states. Yemen has disintegrated into its sectarian constituent parts, forcing neighboring Sunni powers led by Saudi Arabia to intervene militarily to prevent the Iranian regime from turning the country into a Shiite satellite. Libya is a lawless playground of smugglers and ISIS. Then there is Syria, with its barrel bombs, 250,000 dead, and four million refugees.

At the height of the movement, I edited an anthology of essays by young Middle East dissidents. The essayists described an Arab world where men and women were equal, blasphemous cartoonists were tolerated and gay people could live openly, among other fantasies. The book’s now-cringe-inducing title: “Arab Spring Dreams.”

How did dreams turn into nightmares? The standard account has it that by crushing or co-opting opponents, secular autocrats like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak empowered Islamist outfits that were the only remaining channel for dissent. Once the dictators fell, the liberals were quickly sidelined as Islamists and remnants of the old order battled for dominance.

It’s a theory riddled with contradictions. For one thing, it underestimates political Islam. As early as the 19th century, Islamist intellectuals had called for restoring Islam’s lost glory and expelling Western pollutants. To say that the movement’s grip on the region is a reaction against secular dictatorship is to deny Islamists’ agency and inherent ideological drive.

Secular Arab nationalism had already exhausted its energies by the time Mr. Mubarak and colleagues were overthrown. But as the rise of ISIS shows, Islamism represents a longer historical wave only beginning to crest. Many in the West imagined removing the dictators would also diminish Islamism’s attraction. Events didn’t pan out that way.

Nor could Arab liberals forge a third way. The “Revolution 2.0” model of leaderless, social-media-driven protest was effective against unpopular regimes. But it proved insufficient for winning power, and the liberals failed to articulate a coherent ideological alternative with broad appeal. Had they spent half as much time learning from Israel how to plant democracy in Middle East soil as they did demonizing the Jewish state, today the liberals might be in a better position.

The biggest Western misstep was to treat the quest for freedom as somehow separate from the contest for geopolitical mastery. In Egypt, the Obama administration was likely powerless to prevent the pro-Western Mr. Mubarak’s downfall, but the White House in the subsequent months did little to shape the outcome of the revolution. Washington favored all actors equally, as though Egypt were Luxembourg and the Muslim Brotherhood just another center-right party.

In Libya, the U.S. removed Moammar Gadhafi under a legal abstraction—the responsibility to protect—then swiftly abandoned a country with few viable institutions to its tribal furies. In Syria, President Obama declared that Bashar Assad “must go,” and then watched impassively as the Iran-backed tyrant continued to kill and gas his own people, triggering a refugee crisis that has overwhelmed Europe.

The slaughter has continued for nearly five years. In the long term, the most perilous consequence isn’t the birth of a terror state stretching across Syria and spilling into Iraq but the destruction of U.S. credibility. The Arabs know you can’t impose order without being present and engaged in their world.

As for ordered liberty, five years after Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolated, the freest Arabs still are those who are citizens of Israel. Millions fleeing other parts of the region are rendering their own judgment about the state of Arab civilization. The intellectuals and activists don’t dare imagine another uprising because they know that, given an opening, large numbers of Arabs will demand Shariah law, repression of women, and ethnic and sectarian revenge.

Perhaps that’s an unfair judgment, but it follows from a political culture that prizes honor, tribe and piety above reason and compromise. Viewed in that light, it isn’t just the years since the Arab Spring that the region has wasted, but the whole century since it was freed from the Ottoman yoke.

Israel’s Homegrown Enemies. By Caroline B. Glick.

Israel’s Homegrown Enemies. By Caroline B. Glick. Jerusalem Post, December 24, 2015. Also at Caroline Glick.com.

Glick:

By falsely accusing the state of committing torture, right-wing terrorism apologists are advancing the cause of terrorists just as Breaking the Silence advances the cause of Palestinian terrorists.

This past July, unknown assailants threw a firebomb into the home of the Dawabshe family in Duma. The mother, Reham and the father Saad along with their eighteen month old baby Ali were killed. Four year old Ahmed was critically injured.

Authorities immediately alleged that the assailants were members of a Jewish terrorist organization. The accusations were widely disregarded by members of the national religious camp, and by the Right, more generally. But following news that Jewish suspects were arrested for the crime earlier this month, those early allegations ring truer than before.

The Right had good reason to raise an eyebrow at the allegations. The IDF, the Shin Bet and state prosecutors have a long history of open discrimination against the Right.

Fourteen years before the Dawabshes were murdered, then attorney general Elyakim Rubinstein retracted five year old indictments against members of Eyal.

Eyal was a phony terror group put together in 1994 by a Shin Bet agent provocateur named Avishai Raviv. Its purpose was to demonize the national religious community. As the most outspoken critics of the Oslo peace process with the PLO, the national religious community was targeted for demonization.

Raviv and his colleagues had for years sought to entice members of the community to carry out acts of politically motivated violence. And when all else failed, he formed a fake terror group and invited reporters to film its fake swearing in ceremony.

The Shin Bet’s history, along with the IDF’s Central Command’s longstanding policy of portraying alleged Israeli vandalism of Palestinian property as the moral equivalent of Palestinian terrorism against Israelis has led many law abiding citizens on the Right to take allegations regarding Jewish terrorist cells with a grain of salt.

But this week we learned that this time the allegations may well be true. Just as bad, this week we discovered that not only do Jewish terrorists exist, they have supporters.

Wednesday night Channel 10 broadcast a video of young people dancing at a recent wedding in Jerusalem. The wedding was of friends of the men recently arrested on suspicion of involvement in the murder of the Dawabsheh family. Rather than dance around the bride and the bridegroom, as is the custom at Jewish weddings, wedding guests held up rifles, guns, Molotov cocktails and knives and danced around a photo of baby Ali Dawabshe.

The message was clear. The guests at the wedding weren’t waiting for indictments or a court verdict. They were sure their friends murdered the Dawabshehs – including their baby – and they supported the murder.

Here is the place to note that the suspects are innocent until proven guilty. The film is not evidence of guilt.

But the video does show that Jewish terrorists have supporters and those supporters believe that child killers are heroes.

How are we to relate to this state of affairs? How are we to respond to the increasingly sure knowledge that there are Jewish terrorists and that those terrorists have supporters?

Among those supporters are hundreds of people who have tried to shift the discussion from the act of terrorist murder the suspects are alleged to have committed to a discussion of allegations made by their attorneys, that since their arrest the alleged Jewish terrorists have been tortured by their investigators.

How are we supposed to react to those who rush to every open microphone and accuse the state of torturing the terror suspects, rather than consider, for a moment, what these men are suspected of having done? How are we to react to people who, even in the presence of evidence insist that the state is completely evil and the suspected terrorists are simply victims of discrimination?

Those who blithely accuse counter-terror investigators of torturing terror suspects while ignoring evidence and the nature of the crime itself, are terror apologists. In behaving as they do, they serve as the moral equivalent of anti-Zionist leftists from Breaking the Silence and its sister groups who libel Israel internationally.

Both groups of terror apologists use anti-Jewish rhetoric to harm the Jewish state. Both groups libel Israel with false allegations of torture that neither would dare to raise against any other country.

There are of course difference between the two groups.

Breaking the Silence and sister groups like B’tselem are funded by foreign governments. They disseminate their blood libels against Israel to foreign audiences. Their goal is to transform the anti-Semitic mood in foreign lands into anti-Semitic policies by foreign governments.

The ultimate goal of such groups is the destruction of Israel. They seek Israel’s destruction because they believe that Israel is illegitimate and should be replaced by a non-Jewish state of one sort or another.

Unlike their leftist counterparts, terror apologists on the Right do not receive foreign funding. They do not direct their actions to international audiences.

They don’t seek the adulation of the likes of Roger Waters or John Kerry. They don’t encourage Europe to wage economic warfare against Israel or the US to abandon Israel at the UN. They don’t legitimize Arab terrorism.

Their target audience is the Israeli public. They wish to convince the public to accept the legitimacy of the Jewish terrorists by painting them as victims.

But these terrorists are not victims. In their manifesto, the terrorists make clear that they wish to bring about the destruction of Israel. They view terrorism as a means to achieve that aim. One of the consequences of terrorism is that it weakens Israel’s international standing. And in their manifesto, the terrorists say that they seek to use Israel’s “weak points,” including its diplomatic weakness in order to destroy it.

By falsely accusing the state of committing torture, right wing terror apologists are advancing the cause of the terrorists just as surely as Breaking the Silence members advance the cause of Palestinian terrorists when they disseminate their blood libels about IDF “war crimes,” to European and US audiences.

Given the similarity of their actions and goals, it should be clear that terror apologists on both sides of the spectrum must be shunned.

This brings us to the nature of the terrorism that these apologists justify.

Are Jewish terrorists who seek Israel’s destruction different from Muslim terrorists who seek Israel’s destruction?

In two key ways they do differ. First there are the numbers. Whereas there may be a few hundred Israelis who have joined terror cells, tens of thousands of Palestinians are members of terror groups in Judea and Samaria alone. Gaza of course, is governed by a terrorist group.

Second, there are their support bases.

Jewish terrorists are condemned and rejected by every major and minor political force in Israel. Although their support base may have grown in recent years, it still numbers no more than a few thousand people, on the fringes of society.

In stark contrast, the Palestinian Authority and all private and public Palestinian institutions of note lionize Palestinian terrorists. Jailed terrorists and their families receive generous governmental compensation. The general public views them as national heroes and children are taught from preschool on to follow in their footsteps and kill Jews in order to destroy Israel.

Wednesday, as Israel’s entire rabbinical and political leadership stood as one and condemned the wedding guests who glorified Jewish terrorists on the video, Fatah – the terror group and political party led by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas – published a post on its Facebook page praising the terrorist murderers who the same day killed two Israelis and critically wounded a third outside the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem.

For counterterror and law enforcement bodies, fighting Jewish terror poses the same challenges as fighting Islamic terrorism. In both cases, the central challenge is to target and arrest terrorists and infiltrate their networks while continuing to respect the civil rights of the surrounding population.

In both cases, when investigators are contending with active terror networks, they are sometimes compelled to use unpleasant interrogation techniques. As numerous courts, ministerial oversight committees and the Knesset have determined, these techniques are not torture. They are legitimate interrogation methods and they are used sparingly and only when they are required to protect the public from terrorists who target the innocent.

This then brings us back to the wedding video and the difficulty we experience in accepting that Jewish terrorism exists, support for Jewish terrorism exists and both need to be dealt with.

There can be little doubt that Jewish terrorism would be far easier to fight today if the Shin Bet and the state prosecutors had not made malicious use of agent provocateurs to demonize the national religious camp in the 1990s. So too, if IDF commanders and the Civil Administration were less quick to support anti-Israel European funded NGOs against Jewish communal interests in Judea and Samaria today, community members would have less trouble believing the worst about Jewish extremists at the fringes of society. Indeed it would be far more difficult for overzealous defense attorneys to convince anyone that suspected terrorists have undergone torture.

But while the public has legitimate grounds for suspicion, it is no longer possible to dismiss the allegations of Jewish terrorism. There are members of the nationalist camp that wish to destroy Israel. They are willing to commit terrorist attacks against Arabs as well as Jews to achieve their goals.

As a consequence, just as the vast majority of the public demands that the government take all necessary measures to destroy Palestinian terror groups, so the public must demand that the government destroy Jewish terror groups.

Just as we decry apologists for Palestinian terrorism, so we must shun apologists for Jewish terrorism.

In recent years, as the movement to delegitimize Israel from the Left has gained momentum, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has taken to referring to Israel as “the one and only Jewish state.”

To Zionist ears, his constant refrain often sounds grating. Why bother mentioning the obvious?

But today his characterization of Israel rings true. Indeed, it is a reminder of what we can lose, and what we must do everything we can to defend.

We have but one Jewish state. And we will never have another one.

Warts and all, Israel must be defended from all of its enemies. Jewish terrorists, like Palestinian terrorists, are not victims. They are enemies of the state. Their apologists – like apologists of Palestinian terrorists – are also enemies of the state. We must fight and defeat them all with equal determination.